A special issue of the Screen Media Seminar looking at three facets of performance:

Michael Hrebeniak will talk about “Stirbitch: Five Songs of Erasure”, his film & book concerning the medieval Stourbridge Fair held on the margins of Cambridge: an imaginary of a temporary polis and zone of the carnivalesque, now traceless but for the husk of the Leper Chapel.

Andrew Webber will consider some of the agit-prop film-theatre that was produced in Berlin around 1968. His main focus will be the short film, NICHT L öschbares Feuer (NOT Extinguishable Fire) by Harun Farocki, asking questions about the use of film as an experimental device for activist performance.

Clare Foster will revision ‘film’ in terms of exhibition contexts, looking at the rise of second screening, new charges in the concept of liveness, and ways in which the massively successful NT Live both is and is not a return to the early ‘movie theatre’.